Aston Martin Vanquish
Why 5.6: Aston's first V12 flagship paired a genuinely great naturally aspirated engine with a single-clutch automated manual that testers called slow even when new — a real limiter on how much the car gets driven hard today. Values bottomed out over a decade ago and have only recently started climbing as the last hand-built Newport Pagnell Astons get rediscovered.
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Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €214k (2003) → €87k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
The long version
The original Vanquish was Aston Martin's first proper V12 flagship, hand-assembled at Newport Pagnell with a bonded aluminum chassis and a naturally aspirated 5.9-liter V12 that period reviewers genuinely loved — right up until they had to describe the single-clutch automated gearbox, which nobody loved, then or since. That gearbox is the reason this never built the driver's-car reputation its engine deserved; the shifts were slow enough that owners learned to lift and wait rather than fight it, and the car settled into life as a comfortable, torquey grand tourer instead of anything sharper. Values collapsed through the 2000s and 2010s as depreciation did what it does to every flagship GT, bottoming out around the mid-2010s before the last-of-Newport-Pagnell story started pulling early Astons back into collector conversations. What's on the road today splits between owners who bought cheap and drive it as the V12 cruiser it always was, and a smaller group holding out for the values to keep climbing.